


Reconfigure

by polytropic



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Evil Peter Hale, Multi, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-18
Updated: 2013-02-18
Packaged: 2017-11-29 16:39:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/689140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polytropic/pseuds/polytropic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles was perfectly happy to ignore his crush on his best friend until it went away; after all, Scott's already in a relationship. But then Allison finds out, and apparently she's one of those crazy people that actually wants to solve problems.</p>
<p>(Get-together fic, set somewhere nebulously after Season 3)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reconfigure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Moriartys_Minion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moriartys_Minion/gifts).



> This story was written for Moriartys_Minion, who bid on me for the Sterek Campaign Teen Wolf Charity Auction. 
> 
> The Underage warning here refers to various people ages 16 and 17 engaging in consensual sex. Also I wasn't sure if Peter Hale counted as a major character? But I kill him off gleefully, so I figured I might as well warn for it. 
> 
> The story happens from 3 character's POVs: first Stiles, then Allison, then Scott. I hoped that was evident from the text itself, but in case anyone is confused, that's what's going on. 
> 
> Also this is now solidly canon AU because Erica is present and alive, and you know what, unless otherwise stated ALL FUTURE FICS will be canon AU. Because fuck you, I do what I want and what I want is Erica in my stories.

It starts a little ways into their Senior year of high school. Well, it actually started much earlier than that, probably, because as far back as Stiles can remember Lydia has been His Girl and Scott has been His Guy and that’s a pretty clear message in retrospect. But giving up on Lydia kind of sends a shockwave through Stiles’ personal world, and as he’s putting everything back together in the aftermath (of that and a billion other things including way too many near-death experiences) he starts to realize that somewhere along the way Scott grew up. Into someone…kind of really impressive.

It really hits him during the second time Peter Hale is trying to kill them all. Peter always seems to bring out the hero in Scott, probably something to do with him giving him the bite in the first place. It’s kind of a Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker situation, Stiles supposes, only instead of redemption there’s just a lot of fire. Maybe it’s more of an Anakin/Obi-Wan situation, really.

Derek and his Betas have stalled Peter almost long enough for them to get into position but it isn’t quite there yet, and Stiles is just getting ready to taunt the angry werewolf and probably die when Scott steps forward. Peter’s head comes up and tilts, his _hello new prey_ pose, and Stiles shivers. It looks just like it does in his nightmares.

“Scott. Nice of you to join us.”

“Bet you miss the days when you could just call me, huh.”

“A little.” Peter shrugs, and his shoulders shift and settle, rippling from inhuman to deceptively slim. “But I can always count on you showing up to save the day. You haven’t changed at all, have you?”

“Neither have you. Seriously, did you really think we couldn’t tell you were going to try to kill Derek?”

“Am I that transparent.” Peter doesn’t sound at all mad about it, but he’s slowly slinking closer to Derek’s still form. Stiles is shaking a little bit and he tries to communicate “Jesus fuck hurry up we’re all gonna die” to Allison with only the power of his eyes. He’s pretty sure it works because she starts screwing the tip onto her arrow even faster.

“Yeah, you really are. You still go after the ones you think are weak and alone.” Scott moves in between Derek and Peter which was not at all in the plan and Stiles is proud of him but he’s also having an aneurism. Scott is now _in the line of fire_ , and it’s nice that he’s trying to protect Derek, but _seriously_? “But none of us are weak, and none of us are alone. Except you.”

“And yet.” Peter gestures languidly at the sprawled forms of Derek, Erica, Boyd and Isaac around him. “I seem to be doing all right.”

The arrow whizzes out of the darkness with a sound like tearing paper. It clears Scott’s ear by about a third of an inch and speeds straight at Peter’s heart. Peter catches it without turning his head.

“Really, Scott? I expect better from you by now.”

Stiles is wincing and thinking, _Seriously, he’s going with the paternal cliché?_ when he sees it. The next minute Scott spots it too and they stare, transfixed, as Peter’s hand wobbles. They all watch as the arrow, shaft glittering purple in the moonlight, falls from his suddenly shaking fingers. The next arrow hits him in the shoulder, his hand snatching at the air behind it like an afterthought.

“Scott…what have you done?”

“Better,” Scott says, voice flat, and Stiles falls in love a little bit with the meanness of it. “Better tactics, better skills, better wolfsbane. Because we learned from last time, Peter, unlike you.”

“What is this?” Peter is on the ground now, twitching, his eyes still fixed on the purple-dusted arrows.

“From Lydia with love,” Stiles tells him sweetly, and feels mean satisfaction twist in his stomach when Peter’s eyes widen. The lines of purple are already making their way through his veins.

At the end, when the venom has paralyzed Peter fully and his breath is coming short, Scott leans down over him. Stiles is just barely close enough to make out what he says, and he honestly thinks Scott didn’t meant to let him hear.

“I’d say that I’m sorry, or that I hope you find some kind of peace, but I’m not sure I’d be telling the truth. Honestly, Peter? The only thing I really want to say to you is: don’t bother coming back.”

That’s what really cements it, for Stiles. He doesn’t know what it says about him, that he doesn’t really go head over heels for Scott until his white knight armor starts to show the bloodstains, but that’s how it is.

It’s in the aftermath of the battle, when Scott has taken the wolves to Deaton for medical care and Stiles and Allison are limping their way home, that The Conversation happens. Allison twisted an ankle in the run to get to Peter in time so she’s leaning on Stiles’ shoulder, which is a problem because that’s where he’s bleeding from. He shifts her, she winces, they find a better configuration and manage to walk a few more pain-filled minutes, and then Allison says:

“So, you’re kind of ridiculously in love with my boyfriend, aren’t you?”

Stiles is too physically and emotionally exhausted to even feel any terror at this point. All he can do is slide his eyes sideways (a conversation this serious probably merits turning his head but he honestly thinks he might collapse) and admit, “Yeah, pretty much. You mad?”

“Of course not.”

“Cool. Sorry, or whatever.”

 “Stiles, what made you think I was looking for an apology?”

“Well you did shoot Erica that one time she—no? Okay. Cool.”

They wobble along in silence for a while. They’re going to Stiles’ house, because Allison has upgraded from “defying her father’s wishes to help the werewolves which are their sworn enemies” to “defying her father’s wishes to do scary dangerous things when they’re supposed to be retired.” It’s less Juliet Capulet and more Black Canary.

“You should get a superhero outfit,” Stiles puffs. He’s in decent shape and usually the walk from the woods to his house doesn’t faze him, but they ran a lot today already and he is bone tired.

“No spandex.” At least Allison and her super hunter lungs sound out of breath too.

“Fishnets?”

“I’ll consider it.”

“Scott would be into it.”

“Hm, Scott in spandex.”

Stiles chokes on air a little. He is so not ready to go from pining in silence to discussing Scott’s spandex-clad ass _with Scott’s girlfriend_. That is not a jump to make in a few minutes.

“Oh come on! If I can’t talk about how hot he is with you and maybe imagine you guys making out what’s the point of even knowing you like him?”

They’re at Stiles’ house at last and he props himself on the door while he fumbles for his keys, glad for the excuse to look away.

“Okay usually I am all for loudly discussing the epic hotness of my crushes and I would never dissuade a gorgeous girl from imaging me making out with anyone but. It’s just a little…can we not right now, is all? It…I’d just rather not have it rubbed in, just now, that you’re. And I’m not. Sorry.”

“Stiles.” Allison sounds like she wants to say more but Stiles gets the door open at last and wastes no time in kicking off his shoes and sinking down with a sigh.

“No, no moping, we—specifically you and Lydia—defeated evil tonight so we’re going to be happy.”

Allison sits down on the couch next to him. “Fine. Here, let me see if that shoulder needs stiches or just antiseptic and a bandaid.”

“If I need a bandaid I demand the one with unicorns, it makes me feel manly,” Stiles says, but he peels his shirt off that half of him with a wince and turns so she can see the cut. “I feel pretty manly anyways, though. That tree and I totally threw down and I kicked its leafy ass.”

“Well, you’re in luck, no stiches for you. Where’s your first aid kit?”

“Here, I’ll get it.” Stiles hauls himself off the couch reluctantly. At least she’s dropped the subject of Scott. Allison isn’t the sort of person who hangs on to revelations like that, is she?

Six days later Allison shows up at his front door at 8am on a Saturday with a sheaf of webpage printouts in her hand and an upsettingly eager smile. Stiles lets her in mostly because he’s too tired to really process words, and regrets that decision the minute they’re in his room.

“So. You want to date Scott. I want you to date Scott. The only question is: what do we do about it?”

Stiles almost falls off his bed. He ends up hanging on to his bedpost with one arm, and flailing in shock with the other one. “What? You what? We _what_?” he sputters.

“What do we _do_ about it?” Allison repeats patiently. She hauls him back onto the bed with one arm.

“ _You want me to date Scott_?” Stiles yelps, then claps a hand over his mouth and continues at a more moderate volume out of consideration for sleeping Sheriffs. “Did you guys have another fight? Is this a joke? Where are the cameras, and more importantly are they getting my good side?”

“Which side exactly is your good side?”

“The side with my face, duh, this is obviously the moneymaker.”

Allison cocks her head. “I dunno. The side with your ass isn’t half bad? Wonder what Scott thinks.”

Stiles gapes. If Allison had this casually filthy a mind before, he’s never encountered it. “Allison. I like you, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but a threesome’s not exactly what I’m looking for.”

“Oh, me neither. But I am looking for Scott to be happy, and I think this is a good idea. So we’re gonna make it happen.”

“Make it _happen_? No, see, you appear to be under the impression that I’m a person who does things, which is so not the case. Ignoring problems until they go away since 1994, that’s me!”

“And how has that been working out for you lately?” Allison manages to ask the question with such sincerity, as if she’s honestly just interested, that Stiles can’t come up with a good answer in time. She nods sharply. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” She drops the sheets of paper in his lap. “Read these, then we’ll get started planning.”

This is all going to end in tears, Stiles can tell. At least Allison seems like she’ll let Stiles say “I told you so” fairly loudly when it does; that’s really all he can ask.

~~~

When Allison first starts pondering the reality of Stiles being in love with Scott, her immediate thought is, _Thank god_. Being in love with Scott can be so overwhelming sometimes, not just because of everything that comes with it (the danger and mistrust and blood and growling and way too much werewolf hair everywhere on everything seriously Allison needs a clothes brush and probably a vacuum cleaner) but because it gets so intense sometimes. It’s scary. Epic love wasn’t supposed to happen to her, not at age seventeen at least. No one tells you that epic love makes you cry sometimes just because it’s too much feeling to process any other way. None of the books she read as a kid came with a warning that said “Sometimes when you look at him and think about the person he is and how happy you are that he’s a person that exists, it will just plain be terrifying.”

So, thank god, because now at least someone else feels that way too. And she can see it, when she starts looking more carefully. Stiles doesn’t smile helplessly like she does, but it kind of shines out of him in other ways, the way he can’t not be around Scott, the way his eyes focus on him when he talks. She’s a little surprised that nothing in her rises up in jealousy to defend her claim, but she just doesn’t feel it. It’s not there. She wants to protect Scott from anything that might hurt him or make him uncomfortable, but protecting him from someone who so obviously cares about him just seems silly. 

Even when she starts thinking about it more seriously, really turning around in her head all of the possible ways it could go, all she feels is relief. Because maybe with two of them, they’ll be able to keep Scott safe. She misses the big picture a lot, she knows that about herself, and that’s what Stiles is good at. He’s vicious when he needs to be but it doesn’t run away with him, and that’s something she knows she can learn from. And most importantly, Scott tells him things. When Scott gets really scared he starts cutting people out of the loop “for their own good”, and they’ve talked about how that’s not okay to do between them but Allison can’t help but worry that it’ll happen again. Scott has a lot more practice trusting Stiles. Maybe, with the two of them together, they can be the support system that Allison constantly fears she isn’t enough for on her own.

Allison got her sex ed from some useful website links that appeared in her email one day in middle school with a note saying Kate would answer any questions that she didn’t want to ask her parents. Allison still feels that nasty roiling nausea of feelings whenever she thinks about Kate, but the websites are still useful to her, and she pulls up the one about alternatives to monogamy. She browses through the options there, and tries to figure out what best fits this situation. She doesn’t, at this point in time, really want to have sex with Stiles. Not that he’s not attractive—she always kind of wants to use the word ‘beautiful’ for him but thinks he might find it emasculating—but he’s not the kind of friend she’s ever really felt that extra spark with. At the same time, though, she thinks it’s probably pretty silly to pretend Scott is dating them both completely separately in totally unconnected relationships. Maybe they can do some sort of compromise thing where they’re, like, semi-connected relationships. Like a Venn diagram, and the part in the middle includes some dates and maybe some video of them making out because _yes please_ , but no actual three-way sex.

It’s worth a shot.

Phase 1 of the plan starts the next week, because Allison’s lessons on strategy have stressed that preparedness is all well and good but hesitation is fatal. Once one has answered the basic questions (in this case, “Is this a good idea?” and “Is this feasible?”), one has to move before the opportunity is lost. And apparently poor Stiles has been hesitating for years, which is…Allison wouldn’t be able to do that. She doesn’t work that way.

That’s the great thing about Scott: when he decides he wants something he has no trouble moving fast (he asked her out on her _second day of school_ ). Of course, if he decides he doesn’t want something he drags his feet like none other (it took him three years to sit down with Derek Hale and exchange honest apologies. And they’re probably going to be fighting again in a week). So the question is, is this something he wants?

With Scott, it’s all about letting him decide on his own.

“Hey, how are you doing?” They check in a lot, now. It’s something Allison’s therapist suggested, the one she started seeing after…everything. It helps the paranoia, to be allowed to ask.

Scott slides an arm around her waist when she sits down on the arm of the couch next to him. “Not bad,” he says, which considering last week is pretty much the best she can hope for. “You?”

“Actually, good,” she admits. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. What?” She nudges him over so she can sit on the couch properly and flips her legs onto his lap.

“I have this friend who really likes this guy. And he—the guy—has a girlfriend. And my friend knows the girlfriend would be cool with opening up their relationship, but he doesn’t know if the guy would.” The “I have this friend” approach isn’t the most original or subtle one in the book, but Allison isn’t too worried. She has plenty of friends that Scott has never met thanks to moving so much, even if they’re the kind of friends she only sees once a month on IM. “How do you go about asking someone that without sounding like you’re trying to threaten their relationship?”

“Dang, that’s tough.” Scott frowns, his ‘I’m giving this serious thought’ face. One hand rubs her knee absently while he thinks and whoops, now Allison is getting distracted. If he didn’t have such big, warm hands this wouldn’t be a problem. “Does it seem like the guy is into your friend? Or even guys in general?”

“Not sure.”

“I guess that’s the first thing to figure out then, right? All of the, like, logistical questions are kind of not important if there’s no chemistry.”

She loves how Scott always gets right to the heart of a problem. “Yeah, that makes perfect sense,” she tells him, and shifts so that the hand on her knee slides up her thigh. “Now, speaking of chemistry…”

 

~~~

 

Somehow they’ve gotten into the habit of having after-parties whenever they defeat some new supernatural threat. Scott isn’t sure how the tradition started, but he thinks it’s probably Erica and Isaac’s fault: they seem determined to make up for the first two years of high school by cramming all the social life they missed into last two. So that’s how they all end up at Erica and Boyd’s apartment two weeks after Peter’s death, playing truth or dare. (“They” means Scott, Allison, Stiles, Lydia, Boyd, Erica and Isaac, obviously; Derek isn’t invited because that, Scott argued and everyone had to agree, would be creepy. Especially given that most of what they do at these parties is play dumb party games and try unsuccessfully to get the werewolves drunk.)

Allison has had her allotted human’s portion of the vodka already for the night, but because she’s _amazing at everything_ , she isn’t more than a little giggly. She leans her head on Scott’s shoulder and prods him absently in the arm as Lydia turns to her and reminds her loftily, “Some time this century please?”

“Oh, yes, right. Uhm, Scott!” Scott grins.

“Yeah?”

“I dare you!”

“Do you really.” Allison’s dares usually turn out pretty well for Scott. Unlike Stiles’; he’s still living down that peanut butter incident.

“Yes, I do. I dare you…to…uhm…oh, I know, I dare you to kiss Stiles!”

“Uh yes please, today is the day all my dreams come true apparently.” Erica beams like a ray of sunshine and folds her hands under her chin expectantly. Scott is a little unnerved by the unblinking stare she has going on.

“Uh. Allison do you seriously want me to…”

“Yeah, it’s just for fun!” Allison pokes him in the arm again, affectionately.

“I’ll do it with Lydia next, right Lyds?” Erica offers, and Boyd makes an interesting little choking noise and widens his eyes at Scott. He’s not sure if that’s a ‘please don’t’ or ‘please do’ so he ignores it.

“Sure, whatever. Ten bucks says he won’t do it.” Lydia looks up from inspecting her nails to fix Scott with a challenging stare.

Scott is smart enough to recognize when he’s being manipulated. Unfortunately, he admits that he’s not quite smart enough not to fall for the manipulation anyways. It’s Lydia’s dismissive tone that does it, like he’s not _cool_ enough to kiss his best friend.

“Stiles?” he asks, half-hoping he’ll say he’s not down with it so the whole issue dies that way.

Stiles is turning pink. He does that, it creeps up from his neck to his ears and then around to his cheeks. It only ever happens when he’s really anxious about something or really excited, though come to think of it it also happened that one time her finally managed to ask Lydia out.

“Hey, if Lydia and Erica will really do it next, we’d be doing a service to humanity,” he answers. Scott rolls his eyes. So this is the Lydia-fixation kind of pink, then. Figures.

“Fine, get over here Stiles.” Erica cheers, Lydia smirks, Allison claps her hands, and Boyd groans and goes to join Isaac in the kitchen.

“He’s shy about PDA,” Erica explains fondly.

“So that rumor about you guys in the girl’s locker room was false, then?” Lydia inquires, and Erica smiles with all her teeth.

“Didn’t say that.”

Stiles plops down on the carpet next to Scott and nudges him with his knee. “You really cool with this?” he asks softly.

“Sure, why not?” Allison told him to, so it’s not like it’s cheating. And Stiles is awesome, Scott loves him, they’ve shared beds and werewolf problems and every secret they’ve ever had. After all that some spit is no big deal. “But don’t think about Lydia when you’re kissing me, okay? That’s just rude.”

“Fine. I’ll think about that time Beth kissed you in sixth grade and you told her her toothpaste was gross.”

“Dude are you ever going to stop telling that story?”

“Never,” Stiles says cheerfully, and Scott kisses him.

Stiles flails, Scott laughs, and for the first second or so it’s ridiculous and not really a kiss so much as an accidental smooshing of mouths. But Scott puts a hand on the back of Stiles’ head, mostly to get him to stay _still_ , and Stiles relaxes into it, and then they actually are kissing for real.

Stiles’ hair is prickly under Scott’s hand and his mouth is warm. His lips are really soft, and the dare didn’t say anything about tongue but Scott just—he wants to see if—

_God yeah_. Stiles’ tongue is soft too, and slow, and surprisingly gentle. With Allison there’s always a bit of a bite, she twists and surges and takes him by surprise. Scott loves that about her, the challenge that seems to go all the way down to her bones, but he’s thinking he kind of loves this too, the way Stiles melts for him. Stiles whimpers back in his throat when Scott cups a hand around his jaw, and Scott actually has to fight his claws for a second. That’s not a noise he’s ever heard Stiles make before, and he’s making it because of him, and that’s…that’s _amazing_. Allison isn’t loud during sex and neither is Scott, they laugh and whisper sometimes but they don’t really make noises other than breathing. Stiles totally would, though. He would moan, Scott can tell, and wow, he wants to _hear_ it.

At this point he realizes that a) he’s thinking about having sex with his best friend, and b) this kiss has gone on way too long for just a dare.

When Scott pulls back he notices that he still has a hand at the base of Stiles’ skull. He’s been basically positioning Stiles’ head exactly where he wants him, and Scott feels a little weird about being into that but he _totally is_. He’s also never going to be able to look at Stiles’ shocked face the same way again, he realizes as Stiles gapes at him. Not with his cheeks so flushed and his mouth so…open.

“Where’d everybody go?” Stiles asks, and Scott tears his gaze away from how his lips move to see Allison, alone on the couch and smiling that perfect, gorgeous smile that says she’s really happy.

“I made them go into the kitchen because we have stuff to work out,” she says.

“You know they can still hear everything we’re saying, right? Without werewolf powers, probably?” Stiles points out. Scott’s hand is still in his hair. He should move it, probably, but it just fits there so _well_.

“Oh, I’m sorry, did you want them all back in here watching you guys make out? Because I can get them back for you.”

Hearing Allison actually say it snaps Scott out of whatever shock he’s experiencing and he drops his hand back to his side. He knows he’s looking from Stiles to Allison and back again with his eyes huge and it’s probably not very dignified but he is seriously confused about his life at the moment.

“Dude. _Dude_. We kissed.”

“…yeah, buddy, we did.”

“Like, a lot.”

“Yep.”

“A _lot_. There was tongue.”

“Yes there was,” Allison puts in with the same satisfied smile she gets when she makes a perfect shot with her compound. She looks unnervingly sober all of a sudden. Scott stares at her.

“You’re not mad.” It’s pretty obvious that she’s not mad, but Scott is having some trouble making the leap to the next step. “You did this on _purpose_.”

“Oh my god you totally did!” Stiles yelps, and Scott feels a little better that he’s not the last person to get it. “Oh you…you’re good. You’re sneaky.”

“You’re _welcome_ ,” Allison shoots back. “Scott, Stiles has something to say to you.”

Scott isn’t feeling up to doing much more than turning back around to stare at Stiles, who is examining the carpet intensely.

“That’s the tone my dad uses when he wants me to apologize to someone,” he mutters. “You couldn’t have phrased that differently, at all? This is not an auspicious start.”

Stiles is using his ‘you’re pushing me to say something before I’m ready’ voice. Scott knows that voice: that voice is reserved for _really important things_ because everything else is ready to be said pretty much the minute it crosses Stiles’ mind. This is important, and Scott wishes he could concentrate better, but his mouth is still tingling in the way that makes him want to touch it and it’s distracting him.

Scott has never thought about Stiles this way before, but now that he’s started it’s like he can’t stop. It was like this with Allison at first too, the way it would just completely hijack his thoughts even when he really needed to concentrate on other things, and the fact that suddenly his feelings about his girlfriend and his best friend are directly comparable is kind of freaking Scott out a little. He’d be more freaked out if Allison seemed to be having a problem with this, but she looks _proud_ of herself and that’s just plain _confusing_.

…except when he thinks about it, it isn’t really. Not at all.

“Your ‘friend’ has this problem, huh?” Allison shrugs when Scott glances at her.

“Stiles is my friend too.”

Stiles is also pink, from ears to neck. Really pink, and it hits Scott all at once that it’s because of him. Stiles wasn’t turning red for Lydia, he was doing it for Scott, and that makes something huge and light and overwhelmingly possessive unfurl inside of Scott. It’s kind of dizzying, to have the realization of “I want to be the person touching you and making you look like that” come at pretty much the same time as “you want me to.”

Stiles looks like he’s still getting up the courage to speak, but Scott is pretty sure he already knows what he’s trying to say.

“Stiles. How serious are we talking here?”

Stiles scrubs a hand over his hair, and for a minute Scott thinks he isn’t even going to look at him. When he does their eyes catch in a way Scott hasn’t ever noticed before.

“Pretty serious.”

Scott has never known Stiles to be confused about what he wants, so obviously all of this (whatever “this” actually is) is waiting on him.

The thing is, Scott didn’t know he wanted this until about five seconds ago and he _already_ wants it too much. There’s a hungry, grasping thing inside of Scott, a creature that he’d like to pretend is the wolf but suspects is actually pretty damn human instead. Given half a chance it will latch on to Stiles and not let go, and he’s not sure what that would mean. Allison and Stiles both apparently understand how to share someone they love, how to think about them kissing someone else without pain and fury. Scott doesn’t.

“Dude, please say something, this is the worst ominous pause of my life,” Stiles says, tone strained. And because Scott doesn’t speak well under pressure, what he finds himself blurting out is:

“I can’t share you.” Oh, wow, that wasn’t supposed to come out like that. “No, I mean—the open thing. I can’t do that. Allison and I tried it during the whole kanima thing and it was awful. So I couldn’t…you couldn’t be with me and hook up with, like, Lydia too. I can’t do it. I’m sorry, I sound like such a jerk right now.”

Scott often thinks through things by saying them, and as he’s talking things are getting clearer for him: he wants to date Stiles. And Allison. And have what they have now, just more of Stiles too. And he feels awful, because what kind of person says “I want to date two people, but you can’t?” It’s unfair, to ask for both Stiles and Allison and expect them to stay just his.

Stiles is now giving him that look like Scott’s brain is a strange alien creature that he’s not sure he wants to commit to engaging with any more. Stiles is an asshole. Scott wants to kiss him again.

“In what universe am I ever hooking up with Lydia?” Stiles says.

“Damn right!” comes a yell from the kitchen, and then a furious shushing.

“Oh, yeah, thanks, don’t give us the illusion of privacy or anything,” Stiles yells back. Allison giggles from the couch, and Scott wonders if that’s what it could be like now, his awareness of both of them in the room different but equal. Allison’s heartbeat reverberates so much more than Stiles’ but his pulse _pounds_ , like his blood is anxious to get into his veins and start doing things.

He’s looking at Scott again now, carefully, like he’s sorting through what Scott actually meant instead of what he said. “You can’t _share_ me.”

“I can’t,” Scott admits. “I’m pretty much an awful person, huh.” Allison nudges him in the spine reproachfully with her foot but he stands by the statement.

“No, Scott, missing the point here.” Now Stiles is giving him the ‘Scott sometimes you’re dumb’ look. Scott is bizarrely glad he still gets that look now that he’s had his tongue in Stiles’ mouth. “I’m not asking if you’d like a timeshare in my obviously hugely in-demand affections alongside all the other people I’m apparently banging. That isn’t me, dude. Really unfortunate single-minded obsession is my style, you know this. We’re,” he glances at Allison, waits for her nod of confirmation, and then his eyes find Scott’s again unerringly, magnetically, “asking if it’s okay for _us_ to share _you_.”

Oh. “ _Oh_.” Well when he puts it like that, nothing’s really confusing any more. Scott’s tongue trips over itself trying to make it clear how very much _not confused_ he now is. “Yeah. Yes, completely yes, you—we—can I—come _here_.”

Allison laughs and Scott knows that he’s never going to live down the incoherence of that statement. But then Stiles tackles him, hard enough that Scott wobbles catching him even with werewolf strength, and Scott is pretty much okay with being teased by the two of them for the rest of his life.

Actually, right now he can’t think of a single thing he wants more.


End file.
